BSD bintools (Part I)

Project Benefits

This project plans to re-implement part of the GNU binutils based on the libelf and libarchive libraries. It will bring FreeBSD a BSD Licensed toolchain for processing ELF binary file. First part of the project, which is scheduled to complete within this summer, mainly concentrate on re-implementing tools including ar(1), ranlib(1), objcopy(1), strip(1) and composing corresponding manual pages.

Deliverables

Implement ar(1), ranlib(1), strip(1), objcopy(1) based on the libelf library. The goal of the re-implementation is to at least provide identical functionality in ELF binary processing to the GPL'ed counterpart.

Manual pages for these tools.

Status

ar(1) has been committed to FreeBSD

Progress

A test suite was finished.

Tarballs for these utils are available for download. Please use with caution as they are still work-in-progress. Any feedback is appreciated. I will update these tarballs on weekly base.